Sunday, June 26, 2016

Mario Vargas Llosa on the novel and the Inquisition

In the second of the lecture/essays collected in his 1991 book A Writer's Reality, Mario Vargas Llosa permits himself a "long parenthesis"(pages 23-25) on the early history of the novel in the western hemisphere. Here is the entirety of this marvelous digression:

As you probably know, the novel was forbidden in the Spanish colonies by the Inquisition. The Inquisitors considered this literary genre, the novel, to be as dangerous for the spiritual faith of the Indians as for the moral and political behavior of society, and, of course, they were absolutely right. We novelists must be grateful to the Spanish Inquisition for having discovered before any critic did the inevitable subversive nature of fiction. The prohibition included reading and publishing novels in the colonies. There was no way naturally to avoid a great number of novels being smuggled into our countries, and we know, for example, that the first copies of Don Quixote entered America hidden in barrels of wine. We can only dream with envy about what kind of experience it was in those times in Spanish America to read a novel--a sinful adventure in which in order to abandon yourself to an imaginary world you had to be prepared to face prison and humiliation.

Novels were not published in Spanish America until after the wars of independence. The first, El Periquillo Sarniento (The Itching Parrot), appeared in Mexico in 1816. Although for three centuries novels were abolished, the goal of the Inquisitors--a society free from the influence of fiction--was not achieved. They did not realize that the realm of fiction was larger and deeper than that of the novel. Nor could they imagine that the appetite for lies, that is, for escaping objective reality through illusions, was so powerful and so deeply rooted in the human spirit that, once the novel could not be used to satisfy it, all other disciplines and genres in which ideas could freely flow would be used as a substitute--history, religion, poetry, science, art, speeches, journalism, and the daily habits of the people. Thus by repressing and censuring the literary genre specifically invented to give the necessity of lying a place in the city, the Inquisitors achieved the exact opposite of their intentions.

We are still victims in Latin America of what we could call the revenge of the novel. We still have great difficulty in our countries in differentiating between fiction and reality. We are traditionally accustomed to mixing them in such a way that this is probably one of the reasons why we are so impractical and inept in political matters, for instance. But some good also came from this novelization of our whole life. Books like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Cortazar's short stories, and Roa Bastos's novels would not have been possible otherwise. The tradition from which this kind of literature sprang, in which we are exposed to a world totally reconstructed and subverted by fantasy, started without doubt in those chronicles of the conquest and discovery that I read and annotated under the guidance of Porras Barrenechea.

One might spend a long book--or an entire scholarly career--unpacking the many ideas Vargas Llosa crams into these three parenthetical paragraphs, ideas ranging from now-commonplace and highly arguable generalizations to provocative social-historical insights, but I find myself drawn to that wonderful image of Don Quixote, the seminal--and for some, such as Garcia Marquez, the ultimate--European novel arriving in the western hemisphere as contraband, a dangerous drug that alters people's minds. The novel arrived on our landmass the way cocaine and heroin sneak in today: smuggled in shipping containers like the Greek's smack in season two of The Wire. And in a very important way, the greatest novels have never ceased to be outlaws on our side of the world. These original literary illegal aliens have continued to break laws and blow minds, and the entire world is richer for them. All the rude, unruly bastard children of those original stowaway Quixotes are the vertebrae supporting the body of our hemispherical canon: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Moby Dick, Absalom, Absalom!, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Borges' Collected Fictions, Gravity's Rainbow, Terra Nostra--fictions that tried to redefine fiction. All this from a few copies of Quixote stuffed like the Duke of Clarence into a butt of Renaissance wine. Jesus only turned water into wine; those 17th-century book smugglers turned wine into literature, a much better trick.

ABOUT THE TITLE

The title of this blog was shamelessly stolen by the blogger (Mea culpa! Mea culpa! Me a culprit!) from a very good volume of literary criticism, Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, edited by George Levine and David Leverenz. (Little, Brown, 1976). As all true Pynchonians know, TP's working title for Gravity's Rainbow was Mindless Pleasures.

MY TOP SHELF: BEST OF THE BEST NOVELS

ULYSSES by James Joyce

THE TRIAL by Franz Kafka

TRISTRAM SHANDY by Laurence Sterne

THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

MOBY DICK by Herman Melville

IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME by Marcel Proust

ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by William Faulkner

WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy

SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION by Gustave Flaubert

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov

BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy

THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING by Milan Kundera

THE GHOST WRITER by Philip Roth

AUSTERLITZ by W. G. Sebald

THE SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie

AGAINST THE DAY by Thomas Pynchon

SOME GREAT BOOKS MOST PEOPLE HAVEN'T READ

A COOL MILLION by Nathanael West

AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS by Leonard Cohen

CAMERA LUCIDA by Roland Barthes

CENTURY OF THE WIND by Eduardo Galeano

DOWNRIVER by Iain Sinclair

FADO ALEXANDRINO by Antonio Lobo Antunes

HUNGER by Knut Hamsun

INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino

JACQUES THE FATALIST by Denis Diderot

L'ASSOMMOIR by Emile Zola

MAN IN THE HOLOCENE by Max Frisch

ON THE YARD by Malcolm Braly

POEMS OF PAUL CELAN (trans. by Michael Hamburger)

PUDD'NHEAD WILSON by Mark Twain

SELECTED ESSAYS by John Berger

THE ASPERN PAPERS by Henry James

THE ATLAS by William T. Vollmann

THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY by Edmund White

THE BOOK OF DISQUIET by Fernando Pessoa

THE LOSER by Thomas Bernhard

FAVORITE POETS

Ovid

Dante

Shakespeare

John Donne

John Milton

William Blake

William Wordsworth

J. C. F. Holderlin

Percy Bysshe Shelley

John Keats

Walt Whitman

Emily Dickinson

Charles Baudelaire

Gerard Manley Hopkins

W. B. Yeats

Rainer Maria Rilke

T. S. Eliot

D. H. Lawrence

Guillaume Apollinaire

William Carlos Williams

Hart Crane

Wallace Stevens

W. H. Auden

Dylan Thomas

Allen Ginsberg

James Dickey

Philip Larkin

Robert Lowell

Anne Sexton

Pablo Neruda

Paul Celan

Seamus Heaney

Richard Howard

John Ashbery

SOME FAVORITE NONFICTION BOOKS

A HISTORY OF NARRATIVE FILM by David A. Cook

A LIFE OF PICASSO by John Richardson

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn

AGAINST INTERPRETATION by Susan Sontag

BASIC WRITINGS ON POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM by Edward Said

DISPATCHES by Michael Herr

EXISTENTIALISM FROM DOSTOYEVSKY TO SARTRE edited by Walter Kaufmann

FICTION AND THE FIGURES OF LIFE by William H. Gass

FOOTSTEPS: ADVENTURES OF A ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHER by Richard Holmes

IMPRESSIONISM: ART, LEISURE AND PARISIAN SOCIETY by Robert L. Herbert

INWARDNESS AND EXISTENCE by Walter A. Davis

LIGHTS OUT FOR THE TERRITORY by Iain Sinclair

MANUFACTURING CONSENT by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman

OUT OF SHEER RAGE: WRESTLING WITH D.H. LAWRENCE by Geoff Dyer

POSTWAR: A HISTORY OF EUROPE SINCE 1945 by Tony Judt

REMBRANDT'S EYES by Simon Schama

SEXUAL PERSONAE by Camille Paglia

STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE by D.H. Lawrence

THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE by Harold Bloom

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE by Edward Gibbon

THE GAY SCIENCE by Friedrich Nietzsche

THE GOD DELUSION by Richard Dawkins

THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY by Paul Fussell

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS by Sigmund Freud

THE RENAISSANCE by Walter Pater

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE by Naomi Klein

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW by Robert Hughes

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann